Myrtle Gear Solid
by Smileyfax
Summary: A chance encounter just after Harry's showdown with Professor Quirrell gives Moaning Myrtle the ability to interact with the mortal world. Chaos ensues. Regrettably, despite the title this is not a Harry Potter/Metal Gear Solid crossover. Sorry .
1. Chapter 1

The wraith of Lord Voldemort, freshly defeated (for the second time) by the young Harry Potter, furiously flew through the halls and walls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, probing the school's wards for any weak point he could exploit to escape. Dumbledore had had them activated upon his early return, and it would be tricky, but Voldemort could certainly pull it off. Just a few more moments...

"Who's out there?" a shrill female voice called out. "Don't think I didn't hear you!"

Voldemort ignored the voice. There! He began to internally cast the incantation that would alter his wraith-form enough to let him squeeze through the wards. It would weaken him substantially, but to be weakened and outside Hogwarts would be a great deal better than being trapped in here...especially if Dumbledore found him.

"Another ghost? Hmph. You must be new, none of the other ghosts care to be around me. Nobody ever comes to my death-day parties." The voice was now forlorn, and almost sounded on the verge of tears.

"Do shut up, you miserable wretch," Lord Voldemort uttered, as the pestering began to fray on his concentration.

"Shut up! Shut up!" The girl had gone back to shrill again. "You are the rudest spirit I have ever met! Why, even Peeves is kinder than you, you..."

The wraith finally turned to the female ghost as she sputtered for just the right insult to call him, and paused in recognition. "You're that mudblood, who I...who was killed, Myrtle..." He trailed off as he did not recall her last name.

"MUDBLOOD!" Myrtle was absolutely livid at the insult. Forgetting for a moment that both she and the wraith were incorporeal spirits, she pulled her arm back and swung as hard as she could. To the surprise of both her and Voldemort, she connected, and with a loud CRACK!, the girls' bathroom was filled with a blinding white light, and both entities blacked out.

XXXX

After making sure Harry was under the watchful eye of Poppy Pomfrey, Dumbledore made all haste to the bathroom where he had detected the burst of magic. He knew that, even if he had left Harry laying where he had fallen after his confrontation with the Dark Lord and had gone into pursuit of Voldemort's wraith, he would never have caught up with it before it escaped the castle. Still, the magic burst filled him with a quiet dread -- had Voldemort stumbled upon a student during his escape? Dumbledore cut off the line of thought before it went somewhere terrible, and doubled the speed of his paces.

He had his wand at the ready as he opened the bathroom door, wandlessly casting the Lumos spell as it was dark inside. He breathed a sigh of relief -- there was no sign of foul play; no blood, and certainly no bodies. Then, he did a double-take -- there, on the floor, was the unconscious form of Hogwarts' own Moaning Myrtle. This worried Dumbledore, as to the best of his quite extensive knowledge, ghosts did not sleep, nor could they be physically harmed. (They were already dead, after all; nothing could harm them after that). "Myrtle?" he called out gently.

After a second, her eyes opened. "Professor!" she said in surprise. "What are you doing in here?" She gave him none of her usual attitude -- lingering respect for the man that had taught her Transfigurations so many years ago.

"Ah, a...malevolent spirit was recently in the castle, and I thought he might have been in here. Did you see him?"

Myrtle nodded vigorously. "I did, I did! He was very rude, and he called me a...well, a very bad word! And then I...ah..." If ghosts were capable of blushing, surely Myrtle would have at that moment. "I tried to...hit him."

A smirk appeared on Dumbledore's face for the briefest of moments. "Did you, now? Good effort, then!" He resisted the urge to award house points. He cast his gaze around the room, surreptitiously casting detection spells. There was something, but he couldn't quite pinpoint it.

Myrtle tugged on the sleeve of Dumbledore's robe. "Professor, what..." They both looked down simultaneously at Myrtle's hand, still gribbing the fabric loosely.

XXXX

As the early morning sun peeked its way into the headmaster's office, Dumbledore's thoughts once again went over what (he suspected) were the events which took place after the showdown for the Philosopher's Stone: Voldemort's wraith fled Quirrell's body and began searching for a way out of Hogwarts' wards. By sheer chance, he found a weak point in Myrtle's bathroom of residence. As he cast an unknown spell, Myrtle (through her punch) made physical contact, and then...

Dumbledore drew a blank. If he had to blindly guess, he would say it had something to do with the terrible powers he had wielded -- engaging in dark activities no other wizard in recorded history had done before. Maybe something to look into while he researched horcruxes.

The end result was that Myrtle was not quite as incorporeal as before -- she could still pass through solid objects as easily as most passed through air, but now she could exert her will upon the world. Her first act after tugging Dumbledore's sleeve was tugging on his beard, then fleeing into her pipes, thoroughly embarassed. Dumbledore had forgiven her ("Many students throughout the years have wanted to give my beard a tug," he had said. "You are simply the first to do so,") but she refused to come out.

As to Voldemort himself...Dumbledore knew he hadn't escaped outside of the wards. When Myrtle touched him, she had sapped a great deal of energy from him, which left two possibilities: Voldemort was laying low in a secluded part of the school somewhere (perhaps even the Chamber of Secrets itself), or, hopefully, his spirit had been cast from the Earth altogether. It wouldn't do to be too hopeful, unfortunately...with the proper ritual, a horcrux could easily summon back the dead who had moved on entirely.

If Voldemort had a horcrux. Or horcruxes.

Dumbledore wondered if the changes to Myrtle were permanent. No ghost in recorded history had ever possessed or gained the ability to manipulate the tangible, like Myrtle had. There was anecdotal evidence, of course, but most reported instances of ghosts being able to interact with physical objects had turned out to be poltergeist activity. (Peeves, the longest non-living prankster at Hogwarts, was himself a poltergeist, and had never once been alive). It bore watching, at any rate.

A thought came to him: If Myrtle had absorbed Voldemort's power, then maybe...

He stood up at once, grabbed a pinch of floo powder, and tossed it into the flames of his hearth. "Ollivander's," he said, and stuck his head into the flames. 


	2. Chapter 2

"Are you here, Myrtle?"

The headmaster's voice startled the ghost from her new distraction, rolling all the toilet paper off its rolls and onto the floor. For all the time she had spent in the bathroom - in both life and death - she had never cared very much for the old place, going so far as to do her best to vandalize it and in general make it unsuitable for the living. Prior to this new, familiar strangeness of touch, the best she had been able to manage in terms of vandalization was squinching herself up in the pipes, causing the water to back up and flood the room, and the corridor outside with it. (One of her old muggleborn professors, long retired now, had explained that since water wasn't technically a solid, it made sense that she could interact with it).

Now, though, she woke up every morning and gladly separated the toilet paper from its rolls. Sure, it was the summer holidays now so students wouldn't be inconvenienced by her acts, and sure they wouldn't have come into her bathroom anyway due to decades of custom, and sure the house elves replaced the roll every time she moved on to a new stall, but it was still something NEW to do, damnit!

"Myrtle? Are you here?" the headmaster asked again, snapping Myrtle out of her internal digression. She floated through the stall door, accidentally pushing it open as she forgot to de-solidify herself (she had to come up with a better term for it than that). She saw that Mr. Ollivander was with Professor Dumbledore.

"Ah yes, young miss Myrtle," the old wandmaker greeted with a slight bow. "When Albus first came to me with your, ah, unique situation, it proved an interesting challenge. At first, I thought a recreation of your old wand would work best -"

"A wand?" Myrtle interrupted, stunned.

"Yes, Myrtle," Dumbledore nodded. "I wanted to find out if your new...state...allowed for more than just tactile experiences, so I commissioned Ollivander to make you a new wand."

"Well, what about my old wand?" she asked with a huff.

"I'm afraid that it was, well, buried with you," the headmaster kindly pointed out. "It would be highly impractical to disinter the grave, and it's a distinct possibility that it may have become too damaged or simply too rotten after being underground for half a century."

"I certainly can't pay for a new one!" Myrtle pointed out, starting out on the well-worn path to hysterical indignation she usually walked whenever she found herself talking to the living.

Dumbledore placed a calming hand on her shoulder. "Myrtle, please calm yourself," he urged her. "I will pay for any expenses out of my own salary. Now, if you will let Mr. Ollivander continue his explanation..." Myrtle forced herself to calm down and nodded, turning back to the wandmaker.

Looking unperturbed (or at least, no more unperturbed than usual), the eccentric old man picked up as if he hadn't been interrupted. "At first, I thought a recreation of your old wand would work best, but it did not feel right in the making of it. If you will recall, your original wand utilized dragon heartstring, yes? I went through three dozen samples of dragon heartstring, and none of them...fit into the wand, for lack of a better phrase. I went through my stock of unicorn hair and phoenix feather, and none of them felt appropriate either." His eyes had a strange light in them; Myrtle was unable to tell if it meant he had relished the challenge, or if it had driven him near mad with frustration. "Young miss Myrtle, I am able to tell you that not once in my career, not since my apprenticeship ended, have I strayed from those three cores in my craft. And yet, when I was constructing your wand, I found myself considering the possibilities that non-standard cores could provide."

He presented a box that he had held at his side unnoticed. "Hazel, thestral heart-string, eleven and a half inches." Myrtle opened the box and took the wand within. Looking at the two men, she nervously bit her lip and gave the wand a wave.

Silvery sparks emanated from the wand, the same shade as Myrtle herself. She watched with fascination as they slowly fell and faded away, seemingly more like snowflakes than actual sparks.

"Congratulations, my dear," Dumbledore beamed happily. "Would you be interested in re-enrolling in Hogwarts classes?"

Myrtle's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Go back to school? Are you kidding?"

The headmaster shook his head. "Of course not," he assured her. "Let us go to my office, and we shall discuss the specifics...oh, and thank you for your work, Mr. Ollivander." The headmaster shook the wandmaker's hand, and Myrtle gave a curtsy of her own in respect, to which Ollivander nodded back in recognition.

Several questions occurred to Myrtle on the trip to the headmaster's office, and she began to voice them once they arrived. "Isn't it against the rules to have a, well, ghost student?" she asked.

Dumbledore shook his head. "I can recall no such rule in place. There are a few restrictions regarding sentient magical creatures..." He frowned in displeasure at the idea. "However, there are no rules that restrict any human from attending Hogwarts, living or dead."

Myrtle nodded, relieved. "What about my classes? Will I have to repeat first year?" The thought of repeating her first year filled her with nausea.

"No, although you will have to take refresher courses over the summer, both to remind you of what you've forgotten since your passing, as well as to bring you up to date on what new advances there have been in magic in the years since.

The questions continued. Towards the end, Myrtle again brought up the money issue, and Dumbledore assured her that she would be paid for with his own personal funds. "Sir, forgive me for asking, but why?"

A sad, guilt-ridden look passed over Dumbledore's face. "Because, Myrtle, I feel partly responsible for your death. If I had done a better job of protecting the students..."

"But professor, that was more Headmaster Dippet's responsibilities."

"She's right, Albus," Armando Dippet's portrait spoke up from the wall behind him. "Don't beat yourself up over it. And I am truly sorry for your fate, young lady," he said, acknowledging Myrtle.

"Thank you, Headmaster," Myrtle nodded to the portrait. "Professor Dumbledore, even if you had been the headmaster back then, what could you have done about the Chamber of Secrets? The only thing you could have done was to shut down the school before I died, and if I remember right, nobody even thought about closing the school until after that happened anyway."

"You are correct, Myrtle," Dumbledore admitted with a nod. "I suppose...it's just that...you remind me of my...that is, someone, a young lady, who died in my youth. I regret her passing every day as well, but there is nothing I can do to correct that." He leaned forward, looking over the rims of his glasses, his eyes shining with tears he refused to shed. "However, your recent change in condition has allowed me to, in some small part, make up for at least this wrong which I had my hand in." Myrtle nodded, unsure on how to respond to that. Who did she remind the headmaster of? It seemed like he didn't want to talk about it, at any rate. "Do you have any other questions?" She shook her head and, smiling, he dismissed her.

XXXXXXXXXX

The triumphant return of Myrtle Gear Solid! (I really should come up with a better name...)

I considered a few other wandwoods for Myrtle's use. Looking at the Harry Potter wiki, some candidates I had in mind were ash (because of the correlation between ashes and death), willow (for people with insecurities - remind you of anybody?!) and yew (from the Lord Voldemort connection). However, I read an in-universe poem about the composition of various wand woods, and one line specifically stated "Hazel moans", and come on, it doesn't get more perfect than that. (The HP wiki page on hazel did state that hazel wands are more well-suited for those with a firm control on their emotions, but that just means the hilarious possibility of Myrtle's new wand exploding in her hand will ever be lurking in the back of your mind, hahaha).

It seems a bit Mary Sue-ish to have a non-standard core like thestral heart-string, but it made sense to have Ollivander sent outside his comfort zone by the unusual nature of the client, and thestral heart-string just seems so appropriate for a ghost. 


End file.
